Nature's Evil

The treeless Dutch Republic imported timber from Norway and the Baltic lands, floated rafts down the Rhine from the German princely states, and procured rare species from Java. In England, Queen Elizabeth I banned her own subjects from felling trees within 14 miles of any coast or river bank; Peter the Great followed suit in Russia with similar decrees. Portugal imported timber from Brazil, Spain from southern Italy and, at the time of the Armada, the Baltics. As was often the case with raw matter, the cost of transportation exceeded the production cost. The price of timber delivered to an English port was twenty times higher than its purchase price in the Baltic forests. In the eighteenth century, it took 4,000 oak trunks, or 40 hectares of mature forest, to build a British battleship. Contrary to the ideas of mercantilism, it turned out that building ships in the colonies was cheaper than transporting timber across the ocean. Almost half the Portuguese fleet was built in Brazil, a third of the Spanish fleet in Cuba, and much of the British fleet in India. 10

Firearms intensified the great powers’ dependence on their forests. Making guns and gunpowder required an enormous supply of firewood. The smelting of a ton of iron took 50 cubic metres of firewood, or a year’s growth of 10 hectares of forest, and then the forging process needed charcoal. Deforestation was one of the reasons for the decline of Venice and then of the Ottoman Empire. The abundance of firewood was one of the reasons for the success of metallurgy in Sweden and Russia. The pan-European shift from the Mediterranean to the North Sea followed the exhaustion of the southern forests.

Deforestation of Europe

While a forest stood, it remained subject to multiple ownerships, privileges and rights of use. The right to hunt belonged to the aristocracy, but the locals usually had the right of way through the forest, could collect brushwood, and let their pigs forage for acorns or cattle graze in the woods. 11 Once a forest was felled, the land became private property and could be mortgaged or sold. The spreading of Roman law through the North coincided with forest clearings. Surviving as hunting grounds for the local elite, the remaining forests were turned into enclosed parkland. Long considered a byword for wildness and barbarity, the forest, as the historian Keith Thomas has observed, ‘become an indispensable part of the scenery of upper-class life’. 12

Soldiers, traders and monks kept moving east to discover new lands that seemed to them wild, uninhabited and promising. Mingling with the Slav or Finnish tribes who lived in their native forests, the migrants from the west or the south enticed them into the fur or fish trade and then into farming the cleared lands. The historian Fernand Braudel wrote that the Baltic lands were Europe’s ‘internal Americas’. 13 But most of these lands in the North-East of Europe produced nothing but grain and timber. In Prussia, Russia and the Baltic countries, it took 1.5 hectares of woodland to construct a single farmhouse with a barn, which would last only fifteen years – less time than it took for new pines to grow. For most of this time, the house had to be heated with firewood. The rising price of grain and timber led to a new serfdom: landowners forced the peasants to work in the fields in summer and to fell trees in winter. Transportation costs were often prohibitive. The landowners delivered rye and timber to the nearest harbour. Then foreign ships transported the cargoes, and most of the trading profits went to Dutch and English merchants. 14 Thousands of their ships traded in the Baltic, exchanging iron goods, luxuries and firearms for grain, timber and a few other forest products, such as hemp, beeswax, tar and potash. Until 1760, the Baltic ports exported masts throughout Europe; later, American-sourced masts got their share of the market. Endowed with diffused, labour-intensive commodities, the Baltic lands were dominated by their neighbours who possessed topical resources – silver, iron and specialised labour. It was a colonisation by proxy. Trade was profitable, but landowners captured the rent, and the population of these lands grew more slowly than it would have done had people been left to subsistence farming.

Southern Europe made use of the roads built by the Romans, but in Northern Europe the branching network of rivers played a similar role. Instead of building roads, collecting taxes and investing in land, the Baltic states collected customs duty at river estuaries. Their capital cities grew in these chosen locations. Granaries, sawmills and aristocratic mansions sprang up on the quaysides of Königsberg, Danzig and Riga. Landowners managed their estates, which functioned upstream as colonial plantations, remotely. Brute force was used there to make the peasants work.